*on the Artist Formerly Known as Prince — evergreen, no news peg*
The contract was with Warner Bros., signed in 1992, six albums, $100 million headline number that was actually back-loaded and largely contingent on sales thresholds nobody was hitting anymore — and the thing that drove Prince insane about it, the actually load-bearing thing nobody talks about because it's boring and it's contracts and contracts are boring, was the ownership question on the masters.
Warner owned them. Warner owned them in perpetuity. Warner owned them under the standard major-label terms that had been industry-standard since basically the 1950s, which Prince had signed onto in 1977 when he was nineteen and had a lawyer who was good for a nineteen-year-old getting a deal, short of the kind of "renegotiated the back end of the contract such that you'd own your work in twenty years" representation.
Nobody owned their work in twenty years. That was the deal. The deal had been the deal since Sam Phillips sold Elvis to RCA.
So the symbol thing — the unpronounceable glyph, the "Artist Formerly Known As" branding crisis that comedians and late-night hosts spent the entire mid-90s mining for jokes about how the weird little Minneapolis guy had finally lost it — was, mechanically, a contract maneuver. Warner owned the recordings of "Prince." Warner did not, could not, own the recordings of a symbol that did not have a name and could not be pronounced and could not be filed under anything in the legal language of the contract. It was the corporate-law equivalent of Odysseus telling the Cyclops his name was Nobody. Records released under the symbol were not Prince records and therefore did not count toward the contract obligation and therefore could not be controlled by Warner in the same way, and crucially, the touring revenue and the merchandise and everything that could be monetized live and in real time without a record label intermediating, that all flowed to whoever was using the symbol, which was him.
The "SLAVE" written on the cheek at public appearances functioned as literal description. It was a description of what he understood his contract to be — somebody else owns the product of your labor in perpetuity, you have no right to leave, the wages you receive are set by the people who own you — and you can argue about whether the analogy is in good taste (it isn't, particularly, although the Black artist exploited by the white-owned major is a structurally different version of a real and old story going back to like Bessie Smith) and the analogy holds up. He had read his contract. He had done the math. He had figured out that he was producing roughly an album a year, sometimes more, and that under the existing arrangement everything he made would be owned by a corporation that had paid him a fixed advance for it twenty years ago, and that the only way out was to either die or invent a way to record under a designation outside his name, outside his legal name, outside the category of names altogether.
Warner, to their credit (their credit being that they were doing what record labels do, which is enforce the contracts they paid to write), responded with the kind of slow grinding institutional resistance you'd expect — they shelved albums, they delayed releases, they put out greatest-hits compilations from the catalog they did own to compete with whatever the symbol was releasing through alternate distribution channels (NPG Records, mail-order, eventually the internet, which he was on extraordinarily early for a 1990s pop musician — the *Crystal Ball* set sold direct to fans in 1998, before Napster, before iTunes, before anyone in the music industry was taking the internet seriously as a distribution mechanism, and Prince was selling his back catalog out of his house in Chanhassen).
And here's the layer that lands hardest. The "Artist Formerly Known As Prince" was a joke for a decade. Then the entire music industry collapsed because the Warner Bros. business model — own the masters, own the publishing, control distribution, make the artist sign a contract at twenty that you can ride for forty years — turned out to rest on a physical-distribution monopoly that disappeared when Shawn Fanning was a sophomore. And when the dust settled around 2007 or so, every major artist with any leverage at all was negotiating exactly the kind of deal Prince had been screaming about in 1993: shorter terms, reversion of masters, ownership of their own catalogs, direct-to-fan distribution rights. Taylor Swift re-recording her catalog because the original masters had been sold to Scooter Braun is the same fight. Same fight, same mechanism, same grievance, twenty years later, with the entire industry having quietly reorganized to make Prince's position the default position of any artist with the bargaining power to insist on it.
He died in 2016, which is the part that I think people don't fully sit with, owning the symbol but no longer owning his life — fentanyl, prescribed for hip pain that was the result of decades of doing splits and James Brown spins in heels on hard stages, the kind of cumulative bodily injury that is invisible because the performances were so transcendent that you didn't think about the joints, and then the prescription opioid epidemic, which had been quietly killing Americans for fifteen years by the time it reached the kind of celebrity that registered nationally. And the Paisley Park vault — the famously enormous archive of unreleased recordings, several thousand songs by some estimates, recorded compulsively across forty years and stored in a literal vault on the property — that vault, which had been the central asset in the entire Warner dispute, the thing he had refused to release and refused to let them release, became after his death the thing his estate started releasing on roughly an annual basis to a market that absorbed it as legacy product.
Which is to say: Warner won, alongside the original-Warner outcome where the corporation had to settle and let him go in 1996. The structural Warner — the abstract Warner, the major-label apparatus that owns the means of distributing and packaging and monetizing recorded music — won the longer game. The vault is being mined. The estate is selling. The fight he picked at thirty-five over who would control his work after he was gone landed two ways at once: he beat the specific corporation he was fighting, and the structural fact won out at the next layer up — someone always controls the work after you are gone, and the controllers are always going to be people who think about your work as a quarterly revenue line.
The symbol is now a registered trademark of his estate. They license it, and there's a font, and the shape of all this follows directly from the original deal.
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